[Search wiki] Usefulness of Mini Articles [Was: virus ? and some questions]

[Rainer Blome]

Simone Search wrote:
 > 2. How usefull is the wiki with its mini articles for the
 > searchengine?

Mini articles can be a great way to share information about topics 
(queries) which are not adequately covered by existing online resources. 
  That's why I love them.

For a while, mini articles were not accessible directly from the search 
engine.  This severely limited their usefulness.  The plan was to treat 
Mini Articles like other, ranked resources.  With the WISE application 
framework, this has now happened.

There already is a WISE application for Mini Articles (The Application 
Definition Object is in http://svn.swlabs.org/WISE/wise.js (search for 
"miniarticle") and the Application Javascript File is 
http://svn.swlabs.org/WISE/apps/wise_miniarticle.js ).  The app, if 
active, displays the start of the appropriate mini article, if any.
For example, see
http://re.search.wikia.com/search.html#wikia , where I manually added 
the Mini Article app.  You may have to scroll a little to see the app's 
result.

By default, the Mini Article app is not triggered for all queries.
Is this intentional?

This is unfortunate in my opinion.
Unless a user knows that there is a Mini Article about a query, she
has little incentive to go through the trouble of manually adding the 
Mini Article app.  Currently it is somewhat onerous to manually add an 
app, because only a small portion of the list is displayed and one needs 
to scroll through it.  What's more, most users probably do not know 
about the MA app at all.

To make effective use of the existing Mini Articles, the Mini Article 
app needs to be triggered for all queries, like Wikipedia and Freebase.

In addition, it would be nice to re-add a "Write a Mini Article" link so 
that it is easy to add new articles.


 > 3. If Miniarticle are usefull :: what should I edit?

Whatever you like. If you write and edit articles about
topics that interest you, you'll have more fun. :-)

 > 4. is it usefull to categorize all the mini articles?
 > ( I tried to do a lot)

That depends on the individual user.
Personally, I find categories useful, I would not want to miss them.
However, I use categories rarely.  For example, in Wikipedia maybe I use 
them once in a month.  I can not remember the last time I used 
categories in the Search wiki.
So... Useful, yes. Important, no.

Rainer